You spend months growing traffic to your company’s website. You run ads, you publish content, and you promote the brand on social media. Web traffic climbs and climbs, but… none of it turns into leads (or quality leads, at least).
Sound familiar? When marketers see traffic grow without the lead conversions they expect following suit, the problem is often the quality of their website traffic—because the quality of your traffic has a direct impact on conversion rates and the quality of leads that marketing hands over to sales.
Improving the quality of traffic comes down to having a way to measure and identify the problem areas, then optimizing the traffic each channel sends your way.
Plenty of content offers generic tips for bringing in more quality traffic, but there’s no blanket solution for improving web traffic because your traffic doesn’t all come from the same place.
So in lieu of making broad statements about web traffic quality, we’re talking about how to measure traffic quality and identify which channels need improvement. Then, we show you how to get the right traffic from 3 key marketing channels:
Note: Want to track traffic quality from all your campaigns and traffic sources but aren’t a Leadfeeder user yet? Sign up and try Leadfeeder free for 14 days.
How to Measure Traffic Quality
Measuring the quality of the traffic that lands on your website comes down to 2 key pieces of information for B2B companies:
Knowing who is visiting, at the account level.
Understanding how qualified each of those companies is to become a customer.
Once you understand the quality of traffic your marketing efforts drive, you can drill down into individual traffic sources and campaigns to diagnose and fix problematic sources.
In our completely unbiased opinion, Leadfeeder is the best way for B2B marketers to gain access to that information—and for more than just the 2% of website visitors who convert in some way. Using Leadfeeder, you can:
View website visits and behavior at the account level.
Get a deeper look at who’s visiting your website.
Understand which campaigns and traffic sources drive each account to your website.
Note: Want to track traffic quality from all your campaigns and traffic sources but aren’t a Leadfeeder user yet? Sign up and try Leadfeeder free for 14 days.
Using Leadfeeder to Track Traffic Quality and Diagnose Problem Sources
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Step 1: Set up Custom Feeds for your top traffic sources.
Based on your Google Analytics data, identify the top 3-5 sources of traffic to your website. For example, our screenshot below filters traffic coming from paid Google ads—but you might find that Facebook Ads or your email newsletter (or another source) sends the majority of your traffic. You’ll set up a Custom Feed in Leadfeeder to track each of these sources separately.
This sample Custom Feed shows companies who came to the website from a Google CPC ad.
Step 2: Look at the Feed Analytics for each source. Once you’ve created a Custom Feed, click to open it from the dashboard, and you’ll see Feed Analytics, which show the average leads per day, top countries, and top industries that each traffic source sends to your website. You can also dig deeper into company details, behavior, and more for each account in the feed.
Feed Analytics shows average leads per day, top countries, and top industries.
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Step 3: Drill down into campaigns and/or referrers.
If you see that a particular marketing channel is sending poor quality traffic, you can create additional Custom Feeds to narrow in on particular campaigns or referring websites.
By now, you should have a good sense of where your problem lies. As you take steps to improve the quality of traffic each traffic source or campaign sends your way, you can continue to monitor improvements within each ‘Custom Feed’.
How to Get High Quality Traffic From Paid and Organic Search
If you’ve diagnosed search engine traffic as a problem area for traffic quality, the most common reason underlying poor traffic is the same across both paid and organic search. Here’s the problem: You’re targeting too many broad, low intent keywords.
Ranking for and bidding on high traffic head terms can certainly grow your traffic numbers—but it’s a strategy that’s unlikely to bring in qualified traffic with high buying intent. Going after broader terms also hamstrings your creative and messaging. When the audience is broad, you can’t craft the kind of targeted messaging that speaks to the target audience you need to attract.
The solution is to stop spending budget and effort on broad, prospecting terms and refocus your content marketing, PPC, and search efforts on the highest intent keywords—even if they report low volume. High intent keywords are simply phrases and words that indicate the person searching is eager and ready to buy whatever it is you’re selling.
For example, people searching the keyword “marketing” might have all kinds of motivations and needs—that’s a broad keyword. But people searching for “B2B content marketing agencies” are looking for something much more specific. You can infer from their search that they have buying intent to work with a B2B content marketing agency.
From there, finding the best keywords for traffic quality comes down to testing in Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords). For paid search, you can test 5-10 single keyword ad groups (SKAGs) to identify which keywords send the highest quality traffic. Testing with SKAGs enables you to use hyper-targeted ad copy and creative—so you have the best chance to get a qualified click.
Once you know the keywords that bring in quality traffic, you can use them across your marketing—from SEO landing pages to content to ad creative.
How to Get High Quality Traffic from Facebook Ads
There are a few reasons why social networks and paid Facebook ads might be sending low quality traffic to your website:
Your audience targeting (or, more broadly, your understanding of who your target audience is) isn’t specific enough.
You haven’t tested enough (or correctly).
You’ve overemphasized vanity metrics like traffic and engagement.
These mistakes are abundantly common, in part because Facebook makes it really easy to get started, but not necessarily easy to do it well. Many marketers opt for settings like lookalike audiences that offload much of the work of targeting and testing to Facebook’s platform itself.
The solution, then, is to spend more time focusing on who your audience is (both how they look and behave on Facebook and who they are more broadly) and then run tests to ensure your Facebook ads are tapping into this audience. For example, you may find that your target audience is a member of a specific Facebook group, they read Fast Company, and they’re interested in startups and venture capital.
Get a handle on your audience’s interests, details about who they are and what they do, and proxies through which you can reach them (Which thought leaders do they follow? Do they spend time on your competitors’ social media?).
Test individual detail targeting options (interests, job titles, etc.). By running anywhere from 20-40 individual detail tests as their own ad sets, you can identify those that lead to the highest quality traffic and the most sales.
Once you’ve refined and tested your audience targeting, then you can take advantage of settings like lookalike audiences to grow your social media reach.
How to Get High Quality Traffic from Referrals
Unlike Facebook Ads and search marketing, there are plenty of marketers out there who don’t have a set, prioritized strategy around driving referrals to their website. That, in and of itself, is one of the major reasons your referral traffic might be full of low quality leads.
The trouble with referral traffic starts, in part, with the fact that it can be ill-defined in Google Analytics and, thus, poorly understood by marketers.
As Sprout Social defines it, “Referral traffic describes the people who come to your domain from other sites, without searching for you on Google. When someone visits a link from a social network or website and they end up on another site, tracking systems from Google recognize the visitor as a referral.”
For example, if you click on the link to Sprout Social’s article above, you’ll be counted as a referral visitor in Sprout Social’s Google Analytics tracking.
In the same way that lack of specificity can hinder ad campaigns, seeking out referrals from the wrong places can send piles of unqualified traffic to your site, too.
The solution is to be more deliberate and particular about where your referral traffic comes from and where it goes. Before you spend time and budget seeking out guest posting opportunities or sharing content in LinkedIn groups, you need to invest in finding where the right audience is.
When you have a better understanding of where your audience (and the segments and buyer personas within it) spend time online, you can do two things:
Cultivate referrals that will send quality traffic to your website
Send those website visitors through a more targeted flow once they get to your site
Send More Quality Traffic to Your Website
When your B2B marketing efforts aren’t sending quality traffic to your website, no amount of traffic growth will help you hit conversion goals or bring in leads.
Instead, you need to measure and identify problem areas in your traffic quality—only then can you improve struggling campaigns and optimize each traffic source to drive quality traffic and qualified leads.
Note: Want to track traffic quality from all your campaigns and traffic sources but aren’t a Leadfeeder user yet? Sign up and try Leadfeeder free for 14 days.
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